What Obama Means to Me

My parents were white shopkeepers in the black ghetto of Harlem, living in back of a small store, selling things to people even poorer than they were. Their customers were descended from African slaves, while they themselves had left behind a Europe where their kind would soon be killed by the millions.

We were all safe here from servitude and slaughter, but not fully American, free but far from equal.

When I was three and seriously ill, my parents gave up the store and moved away, but my father kept working in Harlem for the next forty years. When I was old enough, I would sometimes go with him on a Saturday for the fourteen hours he spent in a pawnshop there.

The patrons came parading through, most of them well-dressed, almost all black, carrying clothes, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras to offer as hostage for the few dollars they had to have for a few days or weeks.

Some seemed down and defeated, but many were jaunty, with the aliveness of people always dancing on the edge. Seeing me, they flashed white smiles from their dark faces, surprised and amused to find a kid among the forbidding figures guarding the pawnbroker’s cash box. I always smiled back, trying to drink in some of their joy.

Pawnbrokers made loans to the desperate, with higher interest than banks were allowed to charge. In earlier days, they were little more than fences, acquiring stolen goods cheap to resell. Now strict laws required them to be wary--but it was a sad business, bordering on usury, profiting from human misery. For my father, it was simply where he worked sixty hours a week to earn sixteen dollars.

Once he brought home an autograph, from Colonel Hubert Julian, an American pilot who single-handed had opposed Mussolini’s air force in Abyssinia to become known as Haile Selassie’s “Black Eagle.” What led him to a Harlem pawnshop I never learned, but for years I saved that scrap with the flamboyant signature of a genuine hero.

In the windows of Harlem shops, black-on-yellow placards showed the week’s offerings of local movie houses: Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen (huge letters) in “Gone With the Wind” with (much smaller) Clark Gable, or “The Big Broadcast of 1937” starring Rochester and (footnote size) Jack Benny. There was so little to nourish pride on those streets that when Joe Louis (called by newspapers, without irony, “a credit to his race”) knocked out Max Schmeling in their 1938 rematch for the heavyweight title, Harlem erupted in riotous joy.

After returning from World War II, I went to work at City College's Harlem campus, where I fell in love with a beautiful, brilliant young woman. But a decade before Barack Obama was born, we--certainly I--did not have the courage to marry and bring interracial children into that world so little changed from the time of my own childhood.

When the new president takes the oath of office tomorrow, my heart and all those memories will be with him.

The Politics of Poorness

Hillary Clinton and John McCain, each of whom has hundreds of times the family money of Barack Obama, are out there in electoral fantasy land claiming he is out of touch with the poor.

After drinking boilermakers with the boys a while back, Sen. Clinton is now telling Indiana's blue-collar voters that "politics has become too abstract, too generalized" in Obama's elitist world.

“Most people get a lot of meaning in their life from the work that they do,” Clinton says. “People want to be seen, they want to be appreciated, they want to be acknowledged.” And she is out there acknowledging the hell out of them with girlhood tales of helping out in her father's fabric-printing plant and, according to the New York Times, "sounding less like a Wellesley alumna than Roseanne Barr’s old sitcom character, the den mother of her factory floor."

Meanwhile, McCain is calling Obama insensitive to poor people by not endorsing his proposal to suspend the federal tax on gasoline this summer, a refusal "to giving low-income Americans a tax break, a little bit of relief so they can travel a little further and a little longer, and maybe have a little bit of money left over to enjoy some other things in their lives."

McCain, who is still fielding questions about using his wife's company jet during the primary season, and Clinton, who lent her campaign $5 million from her pin money, seem determined to educate Obama on what he failed to learn as an organizer in poverty-stricken communities.

Poor John Edwards

The man may be too clever for his own good.

The brouhaha over yesterday’s New York Times story that John Edwards may have misused a non-profit anti-poverty organization for his Presidential campaign is a case in point.

Edwards supporters respond by condemning the Times’ journalistic methods, non-supporters claim it proves Edwards’ untrustworthiness.

A pattern emerges. Newsweek summed it up: “Edwards strikes some as a little slick, even (or especially) when he is talking about his family trials. As for his political courage, he is making a bet that old-style soak-the-rich populism can be a winner in this election cycle--though the recent flap over his $400 haircuts has not helped his common-man pitch.”

Confession: Edwards brings out the worst in me, a capacity for prejudice that is deeply troubling, a tendency toward letting skepticism slide toward cynicism. He recalls another public figure I once knew, who wrote, lectured and said all the right things and was even considered for a Nobel Peace Prize. But on closer inspection, everything he did benefited him just a little more than the causes he espoused and, in the end, undercut his alleged idealism.

In elective politics, that is far from a fatal flaw. It is too easy to sneer at the gap between a candidate’s professions and his personal life, but somehow Edwards’ background as a trial lawyer makes him look like he is lying from the heart.

In the next year, the extended campaign will keep testing him and voters will be able to make up their own minds about, to use a phrase I once applied to John F. Kennedy, how deep the glamour goes.

As for myself and as of now, I can only fall back with some embarrassment on the cryptic wisdom of the old nursery rhyme:

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

John Edwards' Terror Plan

The script for this writes itself: Critics on the right will call it “the hug-a-terrorist strategy.” Idealists on the left will applaud Edwards for striking at the “root causes” of terrorism.

Both will miss the point, just as the former Senator’s proposal for 10,000 volunteers to help people in underdeveloped countries misses the point about terrorism.

His re-treaded Peace Corps solution recalls the old Yiddish joke about the bystander who keeps yelling at those treating a heart-attack victim to give him an enema. When an exasperated doctor asks how an enema would help a dying man, the answer is “It couldn’t hoit.”

Investing in poverty-stricken areas “couldn’t hoit,” but it won’t make a dent, as Edwards hopes, in persuading millions of people “sitting on the fence” to become our friends instead of terrorist enemies.

This morning, I received an e-mail from Kiva about the status of my micro-loans to small-business owners in Togo, Ecuador, Samoa and the Ukraine. Reaching out to help others is an American tradition but, as a solution to terrorism, it’s a band-aid on a gaping wound.

Bush’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told a conference on Asian security last weekend, "One of the disturbing things about many of the terrorists... is that these are not ignorant, poor people. These are educated people, often from professional families. So dealing with poverty and those issues is not going to eliminate the problem, but it certainly can reduce the pool of people prepared to give their lives for this cause."

So all cynicism about political motives aside, give
Edwards an “A” for altruism but a “C” for coherence.